Manipulating the DOM with jQuery: 10+ useful code snippets

Posted on Apr 20, 2010

The Document Object Model is an API which allows developers to access, read, and modify the content of a web page. In this article, I'm going to show you 10+ extremely useful code snippets to manipulate the DOM using jQuery.

Add a CSS class to a specific element

A very clean way to change an element look and feel is to add a css class, instead of adding inline styles. Using jQuery, this is pretty easy to do:

$('#myelement').addClass('myclass');

Removing a CSS class from a specific element

It’s great to be able to add some CSS classes, but we also need to know how to remove unwanted classes. The following line of code will do that:

$('#myelement').removeClass('myclass');

Check if a specific element has a CSS class

If your application or site is frequently adding and removing classes to a particular element, it can be very useful to be able to check out if an element has a certain CSS class.

$(id).hasClass(class)

Switch CSS using jQuery

As we saw with the previous examples, adding or removing css styles to an element is very simple using jQuery. But what if you want to completely remove the document css file and attach a new stylesheet? Good news, it is extremely simple as well, as shown in the following example:

$('link[media='screen']').attr('href', 'Alternative.css');

Append HTML to an element

When you need to append some html to an element, the append() method is a life saver:

$('#lal').append('sometext');

Check if an element exists

When working with Javascript, we often need to check if an element exists or not. Using jQuery and the length property, it is very simple to do: If length == 0, no elements are used on the page. Otherwise, some are used.